“You said I heard what I wanted to hear.”
He looked away.
Dr.
Carter pressed the call button.
“I want formal imaging now,” he told the nurse when she entered.
“And page gynecology.
Not obstetrics alone.
Gynecology and surgery.”
The nurse looked at Sarah, then at the chart, and moved immediately.
Within minutes Sarah was being wheeled away from the delivery room she had imagined for months.
Emily walked beside the bed carrying the blue folder and the little yellow blanket.
The blanket had waited more than thirty years in a bedroom drawer.
Sarah had bought it when she was thirty-two, when Michael was alive and both of them still believed they had time.
She had packed it the night before because she wanted it to be the first thing wrapped around their child.
Now she could not bear to look at it.
The imaging room was colder.
A technician dimmed the lights and moved the probe carefully across Sarah’s swollen abdomen.
Dr.
Carter stood near the wall.
The older physician had followed them but stayed near the doorway.
Sarah searched everyone’s faces.
She knew by then that something was wrong.
She simply did not know how much of her life had been built around that wrong thing.
The technician stopped moving the probe.
She adjusted the machine and tried another angle.
Then she called for the radiologist.
Sarah closed her eyes.
“There’s no baby, is there?”
Emily gripped her hand.
The radiologist entered, reviewed the images, and spoke carefully.
“Mrs.
Whitmore, I am not seeing a fetus.”
Sarah did not react at first.
The sentence seemed too small to contain what it destroyed.
Not seeing a fetus.
There was a bassinet in her house.
There were folded onesies in a dresser.
Michael’s flannel shirt was packed in her hospital bag because she had wanted something of his near the baby.
For months she had spoken into the darkness of the nursery believing someone was listening from inside her.
Sarah turned her face toward the ceiling.
One tear moved slowly into her gray hair.
“Then what is inside me?”
The radiologist looked toward Dr.
Carter before answering.
“There is a large mass occupying much of your pelvis and abdomen.
It needs urgent evaluation.”
Emily’s grip tightened.
Sarah opened her eyes.
“A tumor?”
“Possibly.
We need more tests before we can say exactly what it is.”
The older physician stepped forward.
“This is why we should avoid conclusions.”
Emily turned on him so quickly that even Sarah looked over.
“Avoid conclusions? She spent nine months preparing to give birth.”
“Emily,” Sarah whispered.
